India - a growing discontent?

There is an outfit that publishes the World Happiness Report.  The primary measure is the "Cantril Life Ladder" (from Hadley Cantril, Patterns of Human Concern, 1965).

As far as I can tell, some 1000-odd people of age 15+  in each of 156 to 158 countries are asked by Gallup polling each year the following question, which in English reads:

“Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

The average for the country is supposed to reflect its level of happiness.   The Cantril Life Ladder is available for India from 2006 onwards.  The report also includes measures that one might think affects the answers given on the Cantril Life Ladder, such as per capita income and life expectancy, and survey measures such as perceived freedom to make life choices, perceived corruption, and so on.  India is generally improving on these measures over the 2006-2018 time period.  One interesting thing is that countries with poorer improvement on these measures can be happier than India.

NYT Magazine: Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths?

I am told that this article is worth reading: "Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps?"
 
Maybe some time I will.

On Graduate School

For a graduate student it can be very difficult. It’s very easy to get discouraged if you have no real understanding that you’re going to be stuck for a very long time.

I could very easily have imagined myself getting discouraged and dropping out of graduate school. That could have easily happened to me under different circumstances.

Graduate school is a different environment and then you start to wonder—“Am I really good enough to do research-level math?” It’s hard, in fact, to tell. You see all these people who are doing great things around you and then you think, well, maybe you’re not cut out for this. So I think it’s important [long pause] to have someone who believes in you.

from an interview with Akshay Venkatesh.

Akshay Venkatesh in the news.

Wincing at the state of physics

High energy particle physics theorists - the people who lead the investigations into the most fundamental aspects of nature - have been having a bad streak.  They have had no major successful new idea in the last forty years, all the theories they've proposed -- and there are lots of them -- have failed to yield an experimental signature.  The excuses for failure are flying thick.

Mathematician Peter Woit at Columbia University in his blog, recently quoted physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, from an answer given in the Q&A session after a seminar, thus:

You could very justifiably say “look, you’re just continuing to make excuses for a paradigm that failed”, OK, and I would say that’s true, and even the paradigm most of your advisors love [e.g. usual SUSY] was already an excuse for the failure of non-supersymmetric GUTs before that.

That is a perfectly decent attitude to take, but I would like to at least tell you that you should study some of the history of physics. This very, very, very rarely happens, that some idea that seems basically right is just crap and wrong, It’s probably mostly right with a tweak or some reinterpretation. You’d have to go back over…, I don’t know how far you’d have to go back, even Ptolemy wasn’t so far from wrong…

Ouch! That is some seriously bad reading of the history of physics.   That was amply pointed out in the comments on the blog.

Rutgers University physicist  Amitabh Lath rightly, I think, pointed out:

Stop picking on Nima. You all are doing the internet thing of taking one statement in an hour talk and ganging up.

But challenged on it, he continued:

Even the pre-Copernican Ptolemaic stuff made sense to me. Basically, there are concepts in a failed theory that you might want to keep (things moving in circles around other things) and others you might want to jettison. Granted, he is not very good at history of science.

 Double Ouch!  Is "things moving in circles around other things" a valuable idea from the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system?  I think it is wrong on two counts -- firstly, the idea of things moving in circles around other things is present in earlier theories of the heavens; and secondly, things moving in circles around other things is not a theoretical idea; it is a root observation, the experience early humans had of the skies, at the very start of the study of the heavens.   For example, the sun rises at the east horizon in the morning every day, sets at the west horizon in the evening  and presumably somehow finds its way back in the dark to the east horizon the next morning, completing a closed loop if not a circle, per the early earth-bound humans.

I'm happy that I'm not in the high energy physics milieu at all.  Lot of mathematics, very little understanding.

American obsession with IQ - v3

I'll conclude this series on IQ with three pages' worth from Scott Barry Kaufman.  Remember he was "classified" at school via IQ test.  His IQ score predicted he was unlikely to finish high school.  This following is about four years after he was so classified.

Continue below the fold.

NNT revised draft

On medium.com, IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

Binet Betrayed

Here's the way Scott Barry Kaufman tells the story of Alfred Binet, the inventor of the modern IQ test.

As the nineteenth century came to an end, business and civic leaders across a number of West European and North American countries united to promote compulsory universal public education.  But this posed a serious problem: how should a diverse population of children be educated?
....
The opportunity of a lifetime {for Binet} came in October 1904, when Joseph Chaumie, the {French} minister of public instruciton, established a commission to create a way to identify students in need of alternative education.....Binet and {Theodore} Simon immediately went to work.
....
Binet and Simon made clear the purpose of their test:

Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded.  We should, therefore, study his condition at that time and that time only.   We have nothing to do either with his past history or his future; consequently we shall neglect his etiology, and we shall make no attempt to distinguish between acquired and congenital idiocy...we do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improbable.   We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth about his present mental state.

....
Along with their test, they also published a number of caveats.  First, they made it clear that their test does not measure a person's absolute level of intelligence.   They warned that their test couldn't possibly offer precise measurement like inches as measured by a ruler.   Instead, a score on their test was simply a classification entirely relative to that of other children of the same age. ....
....
Binet and Simon also acknowledged that many others than intellectual ability could influence performance on their tests, such as the unnaturalness of the testing situation and the potential for the test to intimidate children.   They also mentioned longer term influences, such as background, upbringing, health and effort.   Due to these other potential influences, they stressed the need to compare any person's test results only with those of comparable backgrounds.  Finally, they noted the importance of constant retesting, pointing out that individuals' intellectual development progresses at variable rates, due to different rates of maturation as well as differences in intellectual experiences.
....
It's noteworthy that the Binet-Simon scale never yielded an intelligence quotient (IQ).  In fact, long after Binet's death, Simon indicated that the use of a summary IQ score was a betrayal of the purpose of their test.  While Binet and Simon's purpose was noble, let's be absolutely clear: most people in France just wanted to weed out the intellectually disabled os that the "normal" students would not be slowed down.
....
Alas, Binet's efforts, caveats and cautions were almost completely ignored by the French establishment...Binet and Simon's efforts were wasted in their native France.  Binet personally felt as though he was a failure.

Soon his test would spread like wildfire across the globe-- particularly in America-- and to his horror, his test was used for purposes he never intended.   Toward the very end of his life, in response to statements that children with low test scores would never achieve certain things, he wrote in exasperation: "Never! What a strong word!  A few modern philosphers seem to lend their moral support to the these deplorable verdicts when they assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased.   We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.  We shall attempt to prove that it is without foundation... With practice, training , and above all method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before."

Binet even developed various "mental orthopedics" -- intellectual exercises -- to show the potential for remediation.  But it was too late.  On October 28, 1911, Binet suffered a stroke and passed away at the young age of 54.   The mass testing movement in America had just begun, with the testing proponents carrying with them a completely different conceptualization of human intelligence.

American obsession with IQ v2

Book-ends:  Perhaps it is karma that a nation obsessed with IQ finally got a President that it deserves - self-proclaimed, not simply smart, "but genius....and a very stable genius at that!"

When our intelligence scales have become more accurate and the laws governing IQ changes have been more definitively established it will then be possible to say that there is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals; that the greatest educational problem is to determine the kind of education best suited to each IQ level; that the first concern of a nation should be the average IQ of its citizens, and the eugenic and dysgenic influences which are capable of raising or lowering that level; that the great test problem of democracy is how to adjust itself to the large IQ differences which can be demonstrated to exist among the members of any race or nationality group.  — Lewis M. Terman (1922)

"Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure,it's not your fault" (Donald J. Trump, May 8, 2013)

Take that, you libtard!

I hate the impudence of a claim that in fifty minutes you can judge and classify a human being’s predestined fitness in life. I hate the pretentiousness of that claim. I hate the abuse of scientific method which it involves. I hate the sense of superiority which it creates, and the sense of inferiority which it imposes. Walter Lippmann (1923)                

Some definitions of intelligence

Scott Barry Kaufman, in "Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined" has a graphic itself based on J.D. Wasserman "A History of Intelligence Assessment: The Unfinished Tapestry", which is available online. 

Some few tie intelligence to adaptability.  Definitions below the fold.

Genes and IQ

The Scientific American reports a new idea on what triggers Alzheimer's.

This paragraph triggered me, however:

But at start of the 21st century, researchers uncovered a harbinger for GR {gene recombination}. We discovered that DNA sequences vary from cell to cell, meaning that our brains are a vast mosaic of distinct genomes, a phenomenon aptly referred to as “genomic mosaicism.” These changes are distinct from epigenetic changes that do not directly affect DNA sequences. Scientists have now identified multiple sequence changes that are quite varied and seemingly random, consisting—in order of decreasing size—of entire chromosomes (aneuploidies), smaller copy number variations, even smaller LINE1 retrotransposon repeat elements and “single nucleotide variations that alter individual nucleotides.

How genes determine IQ becomes a bit mysterious if "our brains are a vast mosaic of distinct genomes".   One question presumably would be that are these "vast mosaic of distinct genomes in the brain" the same in some statistical sense in identical twins raised together and those raised separately?

America's obsession

Scott Barry Kaufman notes that when David Wechsler came up with his tests (for the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale) around 1939,

"The test publishers were skeptical.  Why take so much time to measure a person's intelligence? This was antithetical to America's obsession with a fast, cheap and efficient way to categorize the totality of a person".

 This leads to the question, why is America so obsessed?  Is it a by-product of the ideology of capitalism?

Scott Barry Kaufman defies his IQ score

This article in The Atlantic, 2013, titled "The Perils of Giving Kids IQ Tests" doesn't say that IQ testing is useless.

We classify learning disabilities because children with dyslexia require very different academic support than children with Asperger's. In order to help these very different children, we must identify and understand their deficits and the resources those children will need. I have sat in on many meetings in which we - teams of psychologists, teachers, parents, learning specialists, and administrators - work to find the ideal combination of resources for kids with learning challenges. I have even recommended intelligence testing for students who, despite their persistence, diligence and effort, are not succeeding in school. I've seen testing lead to real academic and cognitive improvement, thanks to individualized education plans and access to learning resource professionals.

But the article does say that IQ test results are not destiny, via the story of Scott Barry Kaufman.

Kaufman, writing of his experience in Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. The Truth About Talent, Practice, Creativity, and the Many Paths to Greatness, may have thought he knew what was at stake when he visited that school psychologist for testing, but he would not fully grasp the influence that afternoon of testing would have on the trajectory of his life until much later. The psychologist who tested Kaufman concluded that he had a relatively low IQ, a score low enough to earn him the label "seriously learning disabled."

Kaufman narrates:

After school I dash off to the local library and find a book about human intelligence. I flip through the pages and come face to face with a terrifying chart. At the top is listed the average IQ of PhDs. I am way lower than that number. Tentatively, I go down the list. College graduate? Closer, but still no cigar. My blood pressure is rising. Semiskilled laborer? In my dreams. After some time, I finally find my range: "Lucky to graduate high school," it says.

 But Kaufman "ripped up his label, held on tight to his growth mindset and his well-honed skills of grit, diligence, and persistence, and rode that potential all the way to a Ph.D from Yale."

---
So that makes three - Feynman,  Boyd and Kaufman.  But how many children have fallen victim to IQ humbug?

Cosmo Shalizi takes on IQ

IQ

Because You Really Wished I'd Write More About Books

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, August 2008

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, June 2008

Last Words on Saletan

Reading Skills

In Which I Demand That Slate Refund My Subscription

Uncle Fritz Explains How It Feels to Argue about Intelligence Tests

g, a Statistical Myth

Yet More on the Heritability and Malleability of IQ

Those Voices Again

...In Different Voices

On the Superiority of Sociology to String Theory

PS:

Q: So the analogy suggests that IQ scores are...?

A: A proxy for the skills and habits encouraged by a bureaucratic society; skills and habits which can be at once highly heritable (because of strong transmission through family and neighbors) and highly learned (within the scope of what it is biologically possible for humans to learn and internalize). Innate ability needn't enter into it at all. The implications for democracy would be nearly nil.

Q: And the famous g?

A: Is a statistical artifact, or better yet a myth; but that is another story for another time.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb tweets about IQ

The twitter thread is here.  Please refer to the thread on twitter for full detail.

FYI: IYI = The IYI class: Intellectual-Yet-Idiot
One of the key take aways: "the only robust measure of "rationality" & "intelligence" is survival, avoidance of ruin/left tail/absorbing barrier, (ergodicity). Nothing that does not account for ability to survive counts as a measure of "intelligence".

Sorry for the poor formatting.  Will try to fix.

PS: Also found this:

“I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George
W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.”

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

"IQ" THREAD

"IQ" measures an inferior form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects, meant to select paper shufflers, obedient IYIs.

IQ humbug

The weekly email from "Learning How to Learn" contained this:

Book of the Year

Our very favorite, most highly recommended book this year is Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. This book ranks among our favorite biographies ever. Boyd was a genius level iconoclast (with a measured IQ of 90), and a rebel of the first order, who changed the military’s approach to war and saved countless lives while he was at it. Boyd took on idiocy where ever he found it, whether with bombastic Pentagon generals who were happy to fake important tests, or those who thought they could outgun him in the air. Boyd was so witty, engaging, and fearless in tackling new approaches, and the research behind this extraordinary biography is so artfully done, that it’s a “can’t miss” book for anyone who loves rebels and reading. OODA away!

The highlighted phrase caught my eye.  Wiki has an extensive article on Boyd; but (without reading the book), the best I can do is from a review of this book:

Coram pushes on quickly through Boyd's early school years, covering seemingly inconsequential tidbits such as Boyd's being gifted in math but being pegged with an IQ of only 90. Although the test was suspect, Boyd refused to retake the test and later Boyd used this score to humiliate those who challenged him in a battle of wits.
...
...

Green news - electric cars in China

Per John Cassidy in the New Yorker: in China

Under a new quota system that will go into effect next year, ten per cent of an automaker’s sales in what is now the world’s biggest car market have to be plug-in vehicles. In 2020, the figure will be raised to twelve per cent. By 2025, according to some estimates, electric vehicles could account for a fifth of all the sales in China.

Rangoli 2018

The tradition continues!
Previous years.

QOTD

Via dailykos:

Emmanuel Macron has used the first world war armistice centenary commemorations to call for a “real” European army, warning that rising nationalism and populism threaten the fragile peace on the continent.

“We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” Macron said as he visited the sites of the western front battlefields in northern France on Tuesday.

-- As reported in The Guardian (US) by Angelique Chrisafis, Tuesday, 11/6/2018

Collective Blindness

Margaret Talbot, in the New Yorker:
The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture
Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction.

Brinkmann soon realized that his discovery hardly required a special lamp: if you were looking at an ancient Greek or Roman sculpture up close, some of the pigment “was easy to see, even with the naked eye.” Westerners had been engaged in an act of collective blindness. “It turns out that vision is heavily subjective,” he told me. “You need to transform your eye into an objective tool in order to overcome this powerful imprint”—a tendency to equate whiteness with beauty, taste, and classical ideals, and to see color as alien, sensual, and garish.

Balu’s “The Heathen in His Blindness” is about a more difficult to discern collective blindness.

Media: Tone of global coverage of India and China

Via twitter, Shamika Ravi of Brookings India++ has these. Am looking for the paper.